Leave it to Quebec filmmakers to find a way to make alien abductions and mid-mid-life crises both intriguing and deeply romantic. But that’s what You Are Not Alone (2024) is.
The feature film debut of writers and co-directors Philippe Lupien and Marie-Hélène Viens has a requisite amount of quirk and genre appeal. The frequent collaborators have crafted a gentle indie romance infused with an alien abduction thriller, although that description barely does this surprisingly heartfelt Quebec film justice.
Twenty-something Léo Biron (Pier-Luc Funk) is floating through life. He works the night shift at his mother Sylvie (Sandrine Bisson)’s pizza place, driving around endless Montreal streets, and generally avoiding human connection. This includes Sylvie’s attempts to set him up with the cute new girl on her volleyball team, Rita (Marianne Fortier). Naturally, in a twist of meet-cute fate, Léo winds up quite literally falling for Rita on his own.
The pair begin an awkward, tentative romance. She’s the lead singer of a bad cover band and worries that no one actually knows her. He’s been on a self-imposed isolation for the last year after a bad break-up. Together they’re extremely cute together, though, so things seem promising.
Or at least they would be if this weren’t only half the story.
As hinted at in the opening scene, Montreal has become the hunting ground of a pair of aliens posing as regular people: taxi driver John (François Papineau) and his toque-wearing older female colleague, Lucy (Micheline Lanctôt). The innocuous pair meet regularly at a donut shop to identify potential candidates for abduction and – as we quickly learn – their criteria fits Léo to a tee: male, lonely, and with few social connections.
You Are Not Alone opens with an atypical alien abduction as John sits in his cab outside a bar and mentally summons a man (Pierre Yves Charbonneau). It’s a harrowing scene: a spotlights shines on the man, who stands up in a daze. His arms bend at awkward angles, his legs uncertain and stumbling as he climbs into the cab. John proceeds to drive him to a completely pedestrian house, then the man walks naked into an open fridge that envelops him with light until he is simply…gone.
This is the fate that awaits Léo, who John identifies as his next victim when the pair have their own meet-cute after Léo calls a cab because his car has broken down. John’s interactions with Léo resemble the early stages of a romantic courtship: he orders pizza hoping Léo will be the delivery man, he calls Léo on the phone incessantly, and he even hangs around the young man’s house.
Naturally these two storylines intersect at exactly the wrong time. Léo is finally ready to leave his self-imposed isolation to embark on a romantic journey with Rita when John makes his move. The result is a harrowing sequence that leaves both men shaken: Léo isn’t the empty, willing vessel John expects and the impostor is unexpectedly left freezing after being exposed to the young man’s now-fiery heart.
Suddenly John doesn’t want to feed Léo to the portal; instead he is dangerously attracted to the love that Léo is developing for Rita.
The simplest film comparisons for You Are Not Alone is a combination of Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin and Tilman Singer’s Luz, with a dash of Benson and Moorhead’s Spring. There’s an emotional honesty in the scenes between Funk and Fortier, whose characters are achingly vulnerable as they embark on the early, tentative stages of a romance. It’s not hard to root for Léo and Rita, especially in the awkward first date moments when they’re both afraid to make a (wrong) move.
As the defacto antagonist, Papineau has the most challenging role. John isn’t a real person; he simply looks like one. Papineau strikes the right balance between imposing threat and child-like bewilderment about his lovesick infection, but the danger is palpable when – in the film’s center piece scene – Rita discovers John unexpectedly standing in her apartment. Considering how little actual violence the film contains, the moment is gasp-worthy.
What’s so commendable about You Are Not Alone is how Lupien and Viens don’t overplay their hand. The unconventional elements of the aliens (the fridge, John’s ability to stun and compel victims) are the only true “supernatural” elements in an otherwise grounded film. And You Are Not Alone is all the better for it. There’s an emotional honesty in Rita and Léo’s relationship that is achingly believable and the strange alien story beats work to complement and augment the audience’s investment in the film’s central relationship.
At its (fiery) heart, the film is about two wounded young people who find each other and decide to give a relationship a go under extremely unusual circumstances. It may seem slight, but You Are Not Alone‘s performances, its memorable directorial flourishes, and the just-left-of-center narrative premise more than justifies a watch.
This is a quiet gem and another striking example of the distinctiveness of Canadian genre filmmaking. 4/5
You Are Not Alone had its world premiere at TIFF 2024